Although not eating meat is healthier, less expensive, and will increase one's life expectancy, I don't abstain from meat for any of these reasons. I refuse to eat meat because I have no moral right to eat meat.

Assume, for the moment, that you share your home with a non-human animal. Let's say it's a dog named Ralph. Would you, under any but the most extreme conditions, consider eating Ralph? In our culture most people would be repulsed at the idea of eating any dog, much less an animal they considered to be their own pet. In other cultures this feeling is not shared. In Korea, for instance, it is said to be a common practice at picnics to hang the family dog and then eat it. Some Native Americans were also known for their fondness for dog meat. It is hard to find someone in our culture, though, who would not consider the butchering and eating of dogs barbaric.

In the documentary film "The Faces of Death" actual footage was shown of an anonymous restaurant which serves fresh monkey brains to its patrons. Brains may not be your favorite dish, but you are probably not upset by the fact that people do eat them. However, this restaurant was special: live monkeys were strapped under the dining table with just their heads poking through and the patrons were issued hammers and knives. They proceeded to kill the screaming monkeys with blows from the hammers, then they cut into the monkeys' heads and scooped out the brains onto their plates. What I am describing did not take place in some out-of-the-way third-world village amongst barbarous tribesmen, but in the polished atmosphere of an expensive restaurant with men in dinner jackets and women in their finest dresses. Meat-eaters who have seen this scene have asked, "How could they do such a thing?"

My point in the preceding two paragraphs is this: why is it so easy to see that it would be wrong to eat a dog, or cruel to beat a monkey to death, when it's so difficult to see that eating a cow or electrocuting a chicken is equally wrong and cruel? If you would agree that there are at least some non-human animals that it would be wrong to kill for food, and you agree that there are at least some circumstances in which it would be cruel to kill any animal for food, then you are well on he way to becoming a vegetarian.

It is naturally difficult for us to imagine eating Ralph, an active being that shares his life with us, and whom we feel a genuine affection for. It is also difficult for anyone with a sense of right and wrong to beat a helpless animal to death.

But it takes only a very limited imagination to extend these two ideas to cover all animals. Not only would I not eat Ralph, whom I know and love, I could never eat Bosley, the dog who lives next door (even if his barking often keeps me awake a night, and he snaps at me when I walk by). I know that someone else loves Bosley, and that prevents me from taking his life. Nor would I kill and eat a stray dog that nobody loved, for I know dogs are capable of love, and that is enough. But what animal is not capable of love? If not for man, at least for its own kind?

And if we ask, "How could they do it?" of those people who beat the monkeys to death at the dinner table, how can we answer for ourselves when we eat the remains of animals, butchered just as cruelly, for us? This scene, which eliminates the usual separation between the killing and the eating of animals, should haunt all meat-eaters; you are simply paying a butcher to do what you would probably object to if you had to do it yourself.

Do you decry the killing of animals, yet pay to have it done so that you can enjoy a steak dinner? Do you say that you love animals, yet you pay someone to kill them for you?

Animals are capable of feeling. This fact alone should suffice to make one abstain from killing them. A true ethical code should include empathy. Most of the world's religions have recognized this fact (as shown in our own culture's "golden rule"), but some have failed to apply it towards non-human animals. Empathy means feeling what another feels: sharing the experience of life with others. It means trying to help others enjoy life, and feeling their joy yourself. It follows that you will also attempt to avoid hurting others since you will also feel their hurt. A person without empathy is not a fully alive human being, and the more you develop your empathy the more you will become a fully alive human. Applying this rule, if you have experienced the instinct for survival - the wish to remain alive - you are not going to wish death on anyone. If you have experienced pain and deprivation, you are not going to wish pain and deprivation on any other being capable of experiencing them. Since all animals, not just human ones, can experience pain and deprivation, and since all animals have the instinct for survival, it follows that it is unethical or "immoral" to kill any animal unless your own survival is at stake.

Not only is it immoral to eat non-human animals because killing is immoral, it is immoral because at least a quarter of the world's people are starving to death. Because of the foolish practice of using vast amounts of land to grow food for "cattle" which are then consumed, enormous quantities of land are wasted which could be used to grow food to feed people. If we replaced this grossly inefficient meat-producing method with the raising of food directly consumable (i.e. fruits, vegetable, etc.), we would increase food production at least three-fold, which would mean enough food for everyone on earth. (Of course there are still problems with distribution and human greed: but vegetarianmism is a necessary part of the solution.) Think of this next time you want a steak, hamburger, or hot-dog: in order to satisfy your desire for meat, an animal with a capacity for feeling pain and loving life similar to your own, had to be imprisoned its entire life, and then killed, and several human animals are starving to death for want of food which could otherwise have a chance of being available.

If all the objections that are raised against vegetarianism were true, it would not dissuade me from abstaining from meat. It is obviously immoral to kill animals, for the trivial desire to taste meat, and that is enough for me; nothing else matters in my decision. However, far from being true, the objections raised are always contrary to known facts and in the category of "old wives' tales"

First of all, there is the objection that a vegetarian diet is lacking in some essential nutrients that can only be obtained from eating the remains of animals. The facts, however are these: human animals are by nature vegetarians. They are the only primates who have chosen to eat animals on a regular basis, and they have paid the price in health problems. Because the human body is not specifically equipped to digest the body parts of other animals, the unnatural practice has caused problems with cholesterol buildup etc. This is why statistics show that vegetarians live longer than those who pollute their bodies with meat.

Where are these nutrients, which are claimed to be available only from meat, supposed to come from? The diet of a cow is strictly vegetarian. So how does it happen that the cow itself is a source for our protein and iron, etc.? Obviously the cow must be perfectly capable of storing protein and iron from its vegetarian diet. The myth that only meat can supply these nutrients thus falls apart by its own weight. Vegetarians obtain their nutrition first-hand, rather than having it pre-processed by other animals.

The second objection is religious. People who have not figured out that the Bible is a "fiddle upon which any tune may be played", will cite the passage in which god gives "every moving thing that liveth" to mankind for food after the incident known as "Noah's flood". This, of course contradicts what god later supposedly says about not eating "unclean" animals such as pigs (something religious pork-lovers conveniently ignore). It also contradicts the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" (but this is a commandment the god of the bible is shown constantly breaking and ordering "his people" to break anyway).

The notion that the non-human animals were "put there" for the benefit of the human animals is deeply rooted in our culture, and sometimes appears outside a religious context. People with limited imaginations often put it this way, "What are animals there for if not for us to eat?" The question implies that everything has a purpose or serves some end. The consequences of such an implication are embarrassing; it leads us to ask: what then are humans for? Since we are not the natural food staple of any creature, we must have no purpose at all! Actually, this is true, but it is also true for the non-human animals. They are not "put there" for any "purpose"; they simply are, just as we are. I hope you would feel insulted if someone asked you, "What are you for?" Life has no purpose except what we give it, in that we are reasoning creatures. The non-human animals have survival as their purpose, and anything else their more limited reasoning abilities give them.

A final objection is the idea that farm animals are not treated cruelly, but are humanely treated and humanely slaughtered. I should not need to point out to anyone that slavery is hardly humane no matter how kindly administered, and that "humanely slaughtered" is an oxymoron on the same level as "military intelligence". Even if it were not true that cows are sledge-hammered on the head and then hauled upside-down by one leg, still kicking as they are cut open, or that chickens are "debeaked" with a hot knife and spend their lives in intolerably overcrowded cages, finally being hung upside-down on conveyor lines which electrocute them and hack them up and package them automatically, even if all this were not true, killing them just to satisfy our desire to taste their flesh would still be immoral. But it is all too true. There is no escaping it. Far from encouraging humane practices, some religions makes matters worse: kosher meat earns its name by the practice of taking a large knife to the throat of a fully conscious captive victim so that it bleeds to death. They call this "humane"!

Because we are the ones who have stood up, evolving nimble fingers and brains, it is tempting to think we have dominance over all the earth and whatever it contains. But might does not make right. Such thinking is recognized as immoral in every other human endeavor. The imprisonment, torture, and murder of our kind (I say "our kind" because we are all animals, and these things are carried on daily to the human and non-human of our kind) is wholly wrong, there is no excuse for it. I am as ashamed of factory-farming, vivisection, and fur coats, as I am ashamed of the genocide of native Americans, the holocaust, nuclear weapons, and war. And the only thing I can do about it is not be a part of it by refusing to eat meat, and telling others these facts, hoping they will see the injustice of it too, and have the decency to likewise abstain.

See also:

Beyond Humanist Ethics

Pain On Your Plate

Arguments Against Animals